i decided to make my little behind-the-scenes site public, in part, today. sorabji.me is my ME site, more or less, but only one page of it is public. that is the page of RSS ingestment with which i attempt to keep track of the current projects i have going on, or projects on which i should be working.

everything else at dot me is behind the scenes, which is not to suggest that it is hidden or private, just of no real use to the general public. i run a suite of applications called eGroupware, which probably seems illogical since there is no “group” here, only me, but the applications have proven useful to me, and it was great fun (and maximal aggravation) getting it set up and running some months ago. i had an earlier version of eGroupware running last year but it was obliterated along with millions of other things after the big blowout of November.

i dick around with a lot of things, open source and commercial applications, mostly for fun. i was attracted to eGroupware because of its complexity. i felt like this was an interesting venue for exploration, and expression. it is like a message board on steroids, and this follows up on my interest in reserving an entire message board for myself, or for one person. message threads and discussions, fevered debate and threaded question-and-answer discussions, all fed by one individual. it sounds like something from Pynchon, perhaps, but when I discovered groupware applications I thought the message board format was kind of crude by comparison. i always knew of groupware, of course, but only by reputation as a corporate project management tool. by that account i had no interest in it, and why would i? but eGroupware is free so i gave it a shot for fuck’s sake, and i found it hilarious and intriguing to fill in the nooks and crannies of a software intended for multi-humaned projects with the ravings and associations of an individual. eGroupware has a section for reserving conference rooms and office space. i have no conference roms or office space but i have closets and cabinets, so i set wrote out detialed accounts of what work-related purposes these spaces are put to, and what presence i might maintain there.

i tried doing this sort of thing with any of the various tiki and tikiwiki suites but i never warmed up to them. i also tried an old-school app which i can’t remember the name of now, but which derived from old-style telnet interfaces but now required running a web server separate from Apache or other “typical” web servers. Citadel. It was Citadel. That suite looked like kid’s stuff to me, somehow. the tiki and tikiwiki stuff made similar impressions, though by saying kid’s stuff i do not mean to suggest that they are simplistic or unsophisticated, just that they didn’t exhibit a character suited to my sense of self-importance and frivolous haughtiness.

i feel good about my work lately. that’s not been the case for many months. it is almost June (the blowout was in Novembeeerr) and I think the RAID and the offsite backup and the redundancy are veritable works of art compared to relatively pathetic machinations of yore.. i spend more time doing productive things than i spend on technical concerns.

virtuosity knows many realms, i say.

i remember a high school teacher explaining that you can be a virtuoso in any discipline, but that for some reason the term was mostly applied to intrumental musicians. “you can be a baseball virtuoso,” he explained, noting that the term is more commonly applied to violinists and pianists, but adequately suited to athletes, surgeons, and chefs.

i am no virtuoso here, but some days i feel like one.

i am a virtuoso-so.